New Windows 2000 Track Offers Opportunities

The availability of Microsoft Windows 2000 will bring
tremendous benefits to your clients and colleagues—and
tremendous business opportunities to you, if you can demonstrate
expertise with this latest version of Windows. To help
you establish that expertise, the new MCSE/Windows 2000
certification will be available soon.

To ensure that the new certification is as valuable as
possible to you and your customers, we designed it based
on a job task analysis of more than 2,800 IT professionals
in 85 countries. The new track raises the bar on skill
requirements because professionals like you told us this
was crucial to keeping the certification targeted on real-world
requirements. Here are some of our key findings:

Analysis and design are an increasingly important
part of the IT professional’s job. You and your colleagues
are called upon more and more to participate in design
of architectural solutions that meet increasingly complex
business requirements.

IT professionals rated troubleshooting the most important,
frequent, and difficult part of their jobs. Such troubleshooting
can involve diagnosing and resolving problems with network
infrastructure, system architecture, security, and reliability
and availability.

Much of the increasing complexity of enterprise environments
involves a greater emphasis on Web use and on connecting
remote offices. The majority of environments have secure
Web servers with indexed files and Web sites. IT professionals
are tasked not only with keeping remote offices in touch,
but also with keeping remote users connected.

The new MCSE/Windows 2000 certification stays focused
on your needs and those of your customers by reflecting
these findings. For example, because of the growing importance
of design issues, design exams are now part of the core
requirements for the first time. In response to the emphasis
on troubleshooting, the new exams have an increased emphasis
on this ability. Separate exams for security and network
infrastructure address issues of security, reliability,
availability and networking.

Today’s employers expect an individual with the MCSE
credential to have a minimum of one year of experience
implementing a network operating system. To reflect this
market demand, the successful MCSE candidate in the Windows
2000 track should have at least one year of real-world
experience to pass the exams.

To leverage the skills and knowledge of MCSEs already
certified in Windows NT 4.0, we’ve consolidated four of
our six required exams into a single, accelerated exam
that will make it time- and cost-effective for them to
upgrade to the new certification.